Chef Joshua Resnick offers knife skills tips that will help you cook better food that looks professional. 

<div class="block">Want to cut an avocado without getting hurt? Or would you like to be able to chop an onion without crying? Chef Joshua Resnick offers cutting tips that will help you cook better food that looks professional. </div>

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Cook Like a Pro: Chef Offers Knife Skills Tips to Help You Chop Better and Safer

When it comes to cooking, the secret to making that perfect dish has a lot to do with getting those measurements just right. And the way of course you cut those ingredients here to teach us a few tricks on how to properly slice dice and cut is head chef, Joshua Resnick with the Institute of Culinary Education Chef. Welcome. Good morning everybody. So when it comes to prepping your ingredients for cooking, why are knife skills so important? Well, we really say that there are three things that are important about knife skills. First off, it's making sure that you're moving as efficiently and e actively in the kitchen as possible. We also wanna make sure of course that our food looks good. This is one of the primary reasons that we're gonna do it. But perhaps the most important reason we wanna make sure that everything that we make cooks down evenly. We don't wanna have big and small pieces. Some things are gonna be overcooked, other things undercooked. We wanna make sure that everything tastes the same on every bite. So let's start with an onion. How do you cut an onion? And how do you not cry while you're cutting. Well, the most important thing when it comes to cutting an onion is to make sure that you're using a nice sharp knife and you wanna make sure that you slice through the onion. We don't want to go straight up and down with our knife like a guillotine. We wanna slice through it more. Let the knife do the work for us when we crush it. That's when the water is gonna end up in the air and that's when you're gonna cry more. Yeah, absolutely. So we're gonna start by cutting it in half. So what I want you to do is I want you to put your hand on top and kind of form a U OK? And we're gonna put the tip of the knife right against the onion. And I want you to push forward and slice down through it right down to the cutting board. Exactly. Perfect. OK? Now, from here we're gonna do two different cuts. I'm gonna teach you, you guys how to do a saute slice and we're gonna learn how to do a dice. OK? So for the saute slice, the first thing we wanna do is we want to remove this root from the inside of it. So you're just gonna cut a V on either side of that root. OK? And then what we'll do is we'll just use our hands and that piece should now pop out. And the idea behind doing that is that now all the layers of the onion are just gonna fall apart for us when we go to cut it. Very good. We only have about two minutes. Chef. Can you talk to us about the peppers as well? Yeah, pepper. We wanna use the whole thing. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take off the top and the bottom from it. So we're just gonna take the bottom off and we're gonna take the top off. And if you lose a little bit from that stem, that's OK because now we have nice flat pieces to work with. Here, we stand it up on its side. You always like to cut on a flat surface and we wanna keep this part intact. So we're just gonna cut right where the rib of the pepper meets the flesh and you're just gonna cut down to your cutting board and there you're gonna get a nice flat slice off of it and then you can just turn it and kind of keep doing that cut off all the way around. And then from here, what's nice about it is you can do either a dice or a slice and all the stuff you don't want. Just comes off in one piece. A sharp knife makes so much of all the difference. You guys are using these nice Willie knives that we just got brand new. So tell us more. Why does it matter so much about the knife you use. Yeah, you wanna make sure that the knife is gonna have a nice sharp edge to it and it can hold that edge for you, right? And you just wanna make sure that you have the right shape and size. What you guys have is an eight inch knife which works out really nicely for kind of all purpose cooking. Then from that flat slice that you have, you can either cut a slice like if you're making like a plate or you can turn those slices and dice them into smaller pieces. And chef in like 30 seconds. Can you tell us how to cut a broccoli using the stem? So the stem has lots of good flavor and lots of good stuff that you can use. So we just hold it away from us here. You can use either your chef knife or your perry knife and we're just gonna cut the florets that you can see right at the base here and then those pieces all fall off and you can use those for like your regular roasting sauteing, however you want to cut those. But you can also take the stem. And if you cut right where the florets stop. This part is all edible. You can slice this up here and you can use it for either the base of a soup or you can roast them into a delicious Parmesan chips that I love to add into like a salad with this part here, you just got to use the knife to kind of peel off this outer portion of it. But the rest of the inside is tender and full of flavor. Yeah, I've been told a lot of nutrients are actually in the stem as well. So you, yeah, absolutely. You just take off this little bottom part where it's a little dark but the rest of this right here full of nutrients and full of flavor. Well, chef, we're gonna talk to you again. Thank you so much. Coming up, we'll have more with Chef Joshua Rusney, including how to properly cut an avocado. I struggle with that as well. Looking forward to it, chef can't wait. We're back with head chef, Joe Resnick from the Culinary Institute. Now earlier, you might remember Josh gave us a demo on how to properly cut vegetables, but there is one particular food item that's the cause of hand injuries and emergency room visits every year and that's the avocado I had no idea. Yes. So, yes. So what is the proper way to cut an avocado? All right. So what we wanna do is we have to know that there's a pit in the middle of this. We wanna use our chef knife, which is the longer knife and we're gonna line up the knife in the middle of the avocado and we're gonna cut down until we feel the pit. You don't wanna go too hard, but just give it a little bit of a slice. You should be able to feel it stop moving. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna twist the avocado around the knife. We don't wanna move the knife too much. We wanna make sure that our hand stays away from the, uh, the blade as much as possible. And so you can connect the cut on the other side and then, yeah, just give it a quick twist open and then the place where a lot of people hurt themselves, you're gonna take up the pit. You're gonna use the butt of the knife, which is the back end closest to your hand. You're just gonna do a little tap into the seed and then give it a twist and then you're gonna use your towel. I always want to use a towel for this part to grab that seed and then get it right off your board. Why do so many people injure themselves cutting an avocado? Yeah. I think that a lot of people just try to rush the process a little bit too much or they try to kind of do things too quickly. Best to take your time and do it the right way. Now, once you've cut the avocado, now you have the peel. How do you take that off? So you can either scoop it out or you can actually cut it before you even do that. Just a light hold and using the tip of the knife, you're just gonna make little slices into the o and then you can scoop it out with a spoon or you can even take it one step further and turn it and you can cut it this way as well. And then you just use a spoon to separate all the flesh from the peel. This is the nicest I've ever cut an avocado. I have to tell you, go. Let's move on to carrot. Chef. How do you cut a carrot? The carrot? We're gonna do a dice. So what we're gonna do is we've already cut it down into a 2.5 inch length for you guys because that is the size of a classic Juliette. That's the length of it. Now, what you're gonna do is you're gonna line up your knife a half inch off the side of it and we're gonna cut straight down to our cutting board and then whenever we have a flat surface, we wanna cut on it. So we're gonna turn the carrot now, 90 degrees. So it's on that flat surface and we're gonna do that same thing two more times. And what we call this is blocking for our carrot. So now when you look at it, you have a nice, beautiful 90 degree angles on both sides of the carrot. So now you can get a straight cut out of it. What about those, uh, half moons or quarter moons? Sure. Yes. So if you cut your carrot in half, right down the middle, what you're gonna end up with is a shape that almost looks like it's a half moon cut over here. If we cut that in half one more time. Now, all of a sudden it picks up more of that carrot moon appearance and all you have to do is just slice that to whatever size you want it to be. That's easy enough. How about tomatoes? They seem simple enough. They seem simple enough. It depends on how you're working with it is how you're gonna work with it. So, if we're gonna be cooking our tomatoes, we don't have to worry about dese it. But if you're gonna eat it raw, we want to get rid of all the stuff in here, both the core, the seeds and this kind of jelly that kind of holds it in place. So what we'll do is we'll cut the tomato in half first and then we're gonna put it up on the round side and you're just gonna pinch right up here with your two fingers on the top and you're gonna use your knife to now carve out all that core and flush from the inside and when you get to where the end is at the core, you're just gonna cut straight out and all this stuff is gonna go away. Now, what are some calm mistakes people make when cutting the tomato. Yeah. So a lot of people like to just cut it in half first going across the equator of it. But then it gets a lot harder to remove all this jelly and all the core from the inside. If you're cooking it, not that big of a deal, but we're gonna eat it raw, then we wanna make sure we get all that stuff going. Now, do you remove the jelly or do you keep it in there? Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. Now you can just let it, use your finger and you can just push out all this stuff directly into your bowl. You don't want to get it right onto your cutting board because then it's gonna get wet with all the final product. But now that you've gotten this part on this floret that we have here, you can lay this flat. I always like to cut through the skin first to make sure that I don't, if I cut it this way, you might add the skin get stuck together. But if we turn it 90 degrees and upside down, now all of a sudden you cut through the skin. So you know that you're cutting through each cut. Chef in general. What are the biggest mistakes you see people make when they're slicing and dicing their vegetables? I think the biggest thing is making sure you keep a nice clean organized cutting board. We keep this uh bowl over here to make sure all of our product that we're not using moves away. You wanna have a nice clean organized space because at the end of the day, you don't really wanna be cutting on your table top. You don't wanna cut on a metal surface, you wanna cut on this because that's what it's meant for. Now, I noticed we have a couple of knives here. How do you know when to use the smaller knife for the larger one? Yeah, The paring knife is primarily used for peeling, but you can use it for really any general knife cut that you want. This is called the paring knife because it's a paired down version of the chef knife. So if you feel more comfortable using this knife, that's the best one to work with for you. What veggies do you think people really struggle with? We're talking about avocados and onions? Yeah. I think onions are probably the biggest one. I think a lot of people come to our knife skills classes at ice to kind of learn how to cut the onion properly. Uh, especially because they do cry a lot from it. Um But I think, uh, onions are probably the biggest one. And then, you know, we brought the bell pepper here for that same reason because I think a lot of people start by cutting it the wrong way and then it gets very hard for them to work with very quickly. Is there a secret way not to cry when you're cutting onions, just use a sharp knife and make sure you're slicing and not crushing it. That's it. Ok. All right. Great tips. Thank you so much to Chef Joshua Resnick with the Institute of Culinary Education for joining us today. This is the nicest I've ever cut vegetables. Thank you so much. Thank you guys.